“Sometimes Evelyn got stuck on a word, using it for everything until it started to mean nothing and everything. This week, it was “world.” Everything was the world. The world was everything. It made sense from that vantage point, but the previous week, it had been “wax,” which had the bonus quality of being both a noun and a verb. I waxed her breakfast of wax and then had the wax to give her wax when she really wanted the world. World? Whirled. Whorled. Were Eld. Was she working her way through the dictionary? It was like the language of flowers, a song heard in a different lifetime.”